The ideal local oscillator (LO) for a down-conversion stage in a receiver would have sufficiently low phase noise at all offset frequencies to meet the required performance specifications. In practical designs, tradeoffs are involved. In a phase-locked loop (PLL), key tradeoffs are the bandwidth and the suppression of close-in voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) noise versus the peaking of quantization noise at higher offsets, such as offsets greater than the closed loop bandwidth.